- Jun 3, 2017
- 5,132
- 27,287
On the card situ, Dripping nails it. I'll post up the PC specs I have tomorrow so you can have a good laughThere's another problem with combining two different cards for iRay rendering: the graphical memory of the two cards is not combined, but gets *capped* at the memory size of the smallest card. So, let's say, Notty gets an RTX 2070 with 8GB, and adds her old GTX 960 with 2GB to the rig, then that effectively limits the size of the scenes she can render to only 2GB.
Larger scenes (very easy to get a scene over 2GB, just include 2 characters, some props and a bit of complex lighting, and you're over that amount) will then revert to CPU rendering, which will take days (seriously, days!) to get to the quality Notty currently produces. Daz won't automatically ignore the smaller GPU for larger scenes.
For scenes smaller than 2GB, she'd maybe gain a 20% increase in render speed, but those scenes already render relatively fast, so the gain would be 16 minutes to render instead of 20. It already takes longer to set up a scene in the first place, so that gain is really marginal, might as well stick with the 20 minute render and use the 20 minutes to grab a coffee.
A GTX 1060 (either 6GB or 3GB) and an RTX 2070 are already a bit closer in memory size, and more scenes would already fit into the 3GB version. The gain in renderspeed is also already a bit bigger again, as the 1060 has (depending on model again) 10-20% more CUDA cores.
Overall, combining a suitable high-memory card with a low-memory card is like throwing away half the card. Especially if the old card was already restricting your work, then it's generally not a good idea to combine it with the new card for rendering. Maybe disable it for rendering, and using the old card purely as your display driver works out (there is an option in Daz to manually disable a card for rendering). It'll require some fiddling with some settings in your OS and connecting the monitor to the old card instead of the new card, but it's possible.
But this was why I was hoping to hold on for a bit to make a big leap rather than go interim. However, Four has been a bitch to render if only due to the time it takes to do good renders for the naughty scenes. You can, for example, get by with being a little bit casual with regards to a lot of the walky talky stuff. By casual I don't mean not taking care - I don't mean that at all. But they tend to be easy to pose and the threshold for what is a quality level is perhaps slightly broader.
On the naughties you just can't do that. Everything not only has to be precise but has to look fantastic - else what is the point? So a walky talky might take me 30 mins to render if I've set it up carefully, maybe an hour if it's complex. But the naughties were taking around two hours on average to pop out.
But I digress. Dripping is right. If I go bigger on a card it will need it's own standalone set up sadly.
Last edited: